Along with championing LGBTQ representation and body positivity, Rebecca Sugar’s Cartoon Network cult hit Steven Universe garnered its status as one of the best animated series of the past decade through the care put into its characters and how they served the series’ core themes. Over the course of its six-season run, the underlying values of personal identity, love, and the power to change were told with a compassionate lens focused on the growth and development of each of its principal cast of Crystal Gems. However, the story of its titular hero demonstrated the show's most powerful exploration of self-awareness while also countering archetypal gender norms.
Steven Universe himself, voiced by Zach Callison, is the heart and soul of his family of alien rebel guardians. Poised from the first episode as the Crystal Gem-in-training and surrogate little brother, the overarching plot sees Steven grow throughout the series from a rookie to a leader to the savior of the entire galaxy, along the way being the one-man sympathetic ear for the other gems and their eons of emotional baggage. The tale of Steven is not unlike any other story centering on a kind-hearted child hero with a clandestine destiny akin to Aang in Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender or Son Goku in DragonBall. Like most coming-of-age epics, Steven’s story pits him at the center of a world-shaking conflict that presents him with challenges and opportunities to mature as a person and emerge a hero to his friends.
Where the series deviates from these traditional hero stories is that it puts first and foremost the perspective of Steven still being an innocent child well over his head and how his responsibilities affect him. Apart from imbuing Steven with childlike naïveté, the show makes it clear that Steven’s life is anything but ordinary and that his placement at the center of a centuries-long conflict as the de facto rebel leader is a strain on his impressionable and sensitive youth. While he does make friends with everyone in town and enjoys the typical childhood pleasures of video games and fry bits, his duties to the Crystal Gems make him unable to relate to fellow human children and long lacked a stable home life with his beach bum father living out of a van. Despite being the hybrid-reincarnation of his warrior mother, Steven does not seek to battle in the war he spends his childhood fighting, yet he is expected to by the other gems for what his very existence as a gem represents. These expectations and the content of his character manifest in an openly visible vulnerability.
From even the first episode, Steven had been portrayed as a sensitive and overtly empathetic child all the way through the majority of the series' run, with the earliest episodes even making him out to be an utter scaredy-cat and crybaby. What made Steven a compelling hero by the end of the original series was that his vulnerability was just as much his strength as it was something for him to conquer as he grew. In being the emotional core of practically his entire social circle, he could not afford to deny or hide his feelings or the feelings of others in order to save face and stay strong, and that mindfulness is what made him a well-rounded person and capable hero. His powers themselves even manifested through his matured emotional strength and reflected the control and honesty he had over them. Steven’s burdens did not make him stronger, but being honest about the strain it put him under and why he chose to fight did. His human emotions were what made him powerful, not a liability.
Steven did not withhold his feelings until they were bursting at the seams for he was acutely aware of how he felt and expressed it openly and regularly to his friends. He would cry, sing and display compassion for even his enemies because he did not let his position of being a warrior leader supersede his emotional awareness and trusting nature. While traditionally masculine heroes grew to keep up a steadfast projection of strength void of weakness, Steven’s greatest strength was that he wore his sensitivity on his sleeve, which would result in his greatest personal challenges.
In the subsequent follow-up limited series Steven Universe Future, Steven began to keep his stirred feelings and the effects of his childhood trauma bottled up behind a destructively self-assured cover. Upon reaching young adulthood after bringing peace to the galaxy, Steven started to reflect on the impact his stressful childhood responsibilities put him under and the experiences he suffered through. Just as his powers grew over the series to become the hero everyone needed him to be, they began to fluctuate in catastrophic ways as a response to his traumatic feelings and stress. It was here that Steven began to hide his emotions from his loved ones behind a masculine facade to avoid them, complete with a muscular physique and violent outbursts of power.
After spending so many years fighting the war he was fated to and putting other people’s needs ahead of his own, Steven had grown to deny his own mental health and hide it from his friends as to not worry them and carry on the role of the hero. Steven had grown out of the pure-hearted innocent that was able to take on the universe and began to dwell on what the war had done to his childhood development, culminating in an explosively and literally monstrous meltdown. The series’ penultimate moments are of Steven releasing all of his rage about what had become of him in a terrible display of destructive power, calmed only by the embrace of his loving friends who wish to help him the same way he helped them.
Unlike the traditional hero narrative, Steven’s story ends with him not ascending to even greater responsibility or position of power as a hero, but realizing that he must work on himself as a person to achieve and maintain a healthy sense of self. Of all the show’s themes, Steven’s struggles with his past help normalize recognizing trauma as a valid method of growth and change. Where Steven takes his story in the closing moments of Futureexactly is unclear, but he does so with a regained sense of self-awareness after facing his pain and being re-opened to his own vulnerability.
